I recently got the chance to sit down with Bob Cordes, Vice President of Product Management for Telrex. We discussed his company’s business strategy, as well as the future of the IP telephony market in general.
Telrex is a leading provider of IP call recording and contact center optimization solutions. Their CallRex platform provides easy and affordable software solutions for companies of all sizes to protect, grow and optimize their business. Telrex offers premise-based solutions for SMB and enterprise, and hosted solutions for service providers. Read more about their hosted solutions in this article previously posted on TMCnet.
Please outline your new corporate initiatives.
At Telrex, we continue to add solutions for quality monitoring and contact center optimization, leveraging our CallRex platform for IP call recording and multi-media recording in IP telephony and UC environments.
How is IP communications changing your company’s strategy?
We have been committed to IP telephony from the start, so the market is validating our strategy.
How has SIP changed communications?
SIP enables CallRex to deliver IP call recording to a wider range of IP telephony systems. It does make supporting different systems easier, though a high level of complexity remains across platforms, as various flavors of SIP extensions are implemented by IP telephony vendors.
What is the biggest request coming from your customer base?
Open platform for extensibility, integration with business applications and scalability. Telrex has responded by re-architecting the system earlier this year to deliver a services-oriented software architecture that delivers enterprise-class scalability across multiple locations. We also released our latest—a client-side API that provides full access to all of the core functionality of the CallRex recording and monitoring platform. We provide the API free of charge. We find that many of our VAR partners have development resources on staff. Additionally, with our Microsoft LCS and OCS integrations, our API is attracting a wider range of partners. In fact, the CallRex interface is developed on top of our API, so the API is very robust and well-supported.
What do you think is the future of the market?
Call recording and monitoring is quickly becoming an industry-standard application. We are seeing organizations of all sizes deploying recording and monitoring solutions to protect their business. This means recording calls for regulatory compliance, dispute resolution, increased security and employee productivity. Protecting the business is a driving factor. For instance, by deploying call recording for dispute resolution, our customers find they actually avoid disputes altogether because they have an objective record of what was discussed on the phone. It enables them to drive stronger relationships with their good customers, and it can save a lot of money for the business in finding better ways to address issues.
Going forward, many companies are now recognizing that by recording interactions with their customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders, they are creating an asset for the business that should be leveraged as a valuable resource. Growing the business is becoming a new driving factor for IP call recording and monitoring solutions.
This is not just for companies running formal call centers; rather it’s for every business that has one or more teams of people doing business over the phone every day. These people may be sales representatives or account managers, insurance claims adjustors, or any other type of employee that is highly trained, is expected to follow specific policies and procedures, and is in a position to impact the business. We find customers are leveraging our quality monitoring solutions to evaluate their call recording assets to find new ways of growing the business and operating more efficiently. This includes accelerating training by more quickly and objectively evaluating employee performance, understanding why customers are calling in order to increase first call resolution, capturing the “voice of the customer” to understand the customer experience, streamlining business processes, and identifying ways to increase the value of transactions. We are pleased to see many companies beginning to realize that they are creating a valuable asset by recording interactions. So growth is occurring among businesses with what we have termed “informal contact centers”.
How does the growth rate in the US compare to the rest of the world?
We find IP call recording to follow the growth of IP telephony. Penetration has been highest in the US, with APAC and EMEA second, while we find our LAT or CALA regions are leap-frogging technologies to provide significant growth opportunities.
What do you think of Google and Apple entering the telecom market?
Telrex has been committed to IP Telephony from the start. It has always been a fast moving and exciting market, and we look forward to Google and Apple driving additional innovation.
How about Microsoft?
Microsoft is helping to drive an inflection point for IP communications. Telrex partners with Microsoft and supports their initiatives.
How will wireless technologies change our market?
The infrastructure requirements to record and monitor customer interactions from an ever-increasing mobile workforce will continue to drive the need for all-software IP-based solutions. The market trends favor the approach Telrex has taken from the beginning.
What makes your upcoming ITEXPO presentation a “Can’t Miss?”
Attendees should come to hear about the fastest growing industry-standard business application – IP call recording and monitoring. It offers all types of companies an easy and affordable way to protect, grow and optimize the business in ways never before possible. IP call recording is an excellent example of a solution that fulfills the promise of IP telephony – the idea that communications will evolve from expensive, complex and proprietary hardware systems into software applications running on a data network that are affordable, easy and open.
